Lately, NHL rivals are circling Sharks

SHARKS

Updated 11:08 pm, Monday, February 25, 2013

Head coach Todd McLellan and the Sharks know that with a roster that includes aging mainstays Dan Boyle, Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau (12), their window of contention is rapidly closing.

Head coach Todd McLellan and the Sharks know that with a roster that includes aging mainstays Dan Boyle, Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau (12), their window of contention is rapidly closing.

Photo: Tony Avelar, Associated Press

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Lately, NHL rivals are circling Sharks

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The Sharks are back home this week, and even they aren't sure which team will arrive at HP Pavilion. Will it be the quick team that opened the season 7-0? Or the floundering team that has won only once in the 10 games since then and looks old and slow?

Who, exactly, are the Sharks?

"It's tough to say," Ryane Clowe said Monday of his team's streaky personality. "Its tough to put a finger on it."

Clowe won't be there when the Sharks take the ice Tuesday against Colorado. On Monday, Clowe was suspended by the league for an additional game - he sat out one already - for instigating a fight with Chicago forward Andrew Shaw on Friday.

The altercation came in the waning seconds of another loss. The fact that Clowe was determined to be part of a legal line change, and not simply jumping off the bench to fight, limited his possible suspension. And that's about all that passes for good news around the Sharks these days.

"We're struggling scoring goals," head coach Todd McLellan said. "This team needs to find a way to win."

The Sharks have seven goals in their past seven games. Four players have accounted for 75 percent of their goals; the depth on the roster isn't producing. The power play, which was clicking during the hot start, is struggling.

And the Sharks' speed isn't there.

"We played a very fast game in the first seven games," McLellan said. "We were quick. So now all of a sudden, we're not as fast? I don't know."

In hockey, "not as fast" is another way of saying "slow." And "slow" is another word for "old."

The truth is the Sharks, who were one of the best teams in hockey for most of the past five seasons, might have missed their window of opportunity. The core of the team is virtually the same as the one that secured the No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the Western Conference for four straight seasons, from 2008 through '11. The Sharks lost in five games in the first round last year, yet chose to bring largely the same team back, with Thornton and Marleau as the centerpiece players.

After the fast start, the rest of the league is skating past them. The Sharks have fallen to a ninth-place tie in the West, out of playoff position.

This season isn't going to be kind to an aging team. Though the Sharks' players refuse to blame the compacted schedule, the result of the prolonged lockout, things aren't going to get easier. The team has little practice time because almost every off day is reserved for travel. The Sharks play 31 games in the next 60 days; the schedule includes four four-game weeks and five pairs of back-to-back games.

And with every day that passes, the feeling of urgency increases.

"You lose this many in a row, definitely," Pavelski said.

Though it seems early - the season started in late January - in reality, it's already late. The Sharks are nearly halfway through the schedule. A difficult stretch, like the one the Sharks are enduring, accounts for more than a fifth of the season.

"It magnifies everything," Clowe said. "You realize how quick it goes. It feels like we just started playing, yet we're almost halfway through."

Which means the Sharks have to figure out how to correct things now.

McLellan said the team is working on the power play.

"It's hard to imagine that a group of players that talented, executing a familiar system that's been proven to work, can't find their game," he said. "The challenge is huge for us as a group."

If there's anyone feeling the pressure, it's McLellan. Since he became head coach in June 2008, McLellan has compiled an impressive record - but being an NHL coach means having little job security. When the Sharks added Larry Robinson - who coached the Devils to a Stanley Cup championship - to their staff, it was widely interpreted as a move to put pressure on McLellan and have a replacement in reserve, no matter how much general manager Doug Wilson denied it.

McLellan knows he's on the hot seat.

"Since July of '08," McClellan said, "that's what we do.

"But I think you'd know if you lost the room, and I don't think we're anywhere near that."

Meanwhile, this odd, shortened season is slipping away.

"There's a lot of urgency," McLellan said. "We were ahead of it. Now we're in the middle of it."

And before you know it, they'll be at the end of it. The Sharks need to figure out who they are. Fast.

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